This invention relates generally to expert systems and more particularly to web-based expert systems that pertain to decision making processes.
In today""s global economy, many businesses operate with numerous facilities located around the world. Quite often, similar processes, such as manufacturing and repair processes, are performed at the business""s various facilities. Many of these operations are technically complex, decision making processes, and the end result is that process variation can exist between the facilities such that sub-optimal use of available technology occurs.
One approach to combatting such process variation is to employ written communications, such as manuals, and cross-site employee training. However, it is difficult to promptly produces updated manuals and to assure that each facility is using the most recent version. Employee training efforts are time consuming and costly, particularly when dealing with groups of employees located throughout the world. Thus, it has been proposed to use the Internet, and more specifically the World Wide Web, to quickly distribute information on a global basis and reduce or eliminate process variation. Specifically, the knowledge, judgement and experience of one or more experts in a particular process is captured in an expert system application that a business then deploys across its internal and/or external web sites. The expert system application can then be accessed by selected users around the world. Thus, users in any location would be able to easily and quickly obtain standardized process information.
However, web-based expert system applications can be difficult to create and deploy. In many cases, extensive knowledge of the process that the application is to cover as well as programming languages and web authoring is required to create and deploy a web-based expert system. The process knowledge is normally held by persons who have little knowledge of how to distribute their experiential knowledge over the Web. Thus, producing a web-based expert system application usually requires process experts working in collaboration with one or more people having web authoring expertise. This is often a time consuming and expensive effort.
Accordingly, there is a need for a simple tool that would allow knowledge experts to develop web-based applications for distributing their knowledge base.
The above-mentioned need is met by the present invention, which provides a system and method for producing a process advisor application. The system includes a process mapping program for creating a decision tree, a compiler for compiling the decision tree into a data file, and a program for converting the data file into one or more computer viewable documents. The method includes creating a decision tree, compiling the decision tree into a data file, and converting the data file into one or more computer viewable documents.
The present invention and its advantages over the prior art will become apparent upon reading the following detailed description and the appended claims with reference to the accompanying drawings.